Wisdom Joined to Religion

When I think it over, Emperor Constantine — and I turn the first condition of the human race in my mind again and again — it seems to me both astonishing and shameful. In the folly of a single age people took up all sorts of superstitions and came to believe that many gods exist, and so they suddenly fell into such ignorance of themselves that, once the truth had been taken from their sight, they no longer kept the religion of the true God, nor even the condition proper to human nature, since they stopped looking for the highest good in heaven and looked for it on earth. That, surely, is why the happiness of the earliest ages was lost. Once people had left God, the parent and founder of everything, they began to worship the senseless things their own hands had made. What that corruption produced, and what evils it let in, the subject itself makes plain enough. They turned away from the highest good — which is blessed and everlasting for this very reason, that it cannot be seen or touched or grasped — and away from the virtues that agree with that good and are just as immortal. They slid down to these corrupt and fragile gods, and gave themselves to the things that only decorate and feed and please the body. So they earned everlasting death for themselves, together with their gods and their bodily goods, because every body is subject to death. Superstitions of this kind, then, were followed by injustice and impiety, as they had to be. People stopped lifting their faces to the sky; with their minds pressed downward they clung to the goods of the earth, just as they clung to superstitions born of the earth. Then came the falling-out of the human race, and fraud, and every kind of wickedness. Despising eternal and incorruptible goods, the only ones a person ought to want, they chose instead what is temporary and short-lived; and they put more trust in evil, since they preferred vice to virtue because vice had offered itself closer at hand. [a]

So human life, which in earlier ages had been lived in the clearest light, was overrun with gloom and darkness. And in keeping with that decline, once wisdom had been taken away, people began at last to claim the name of wise for themselves. Back when everyone was wise, no one was called by that name. I only wish the name had kept its force, once shared by the whole class of humanity and now cut down to a few! Those few might perhaps have been able, by ability or by standing or by constant urging, to free the people from their vices and errors. But wisdom had died out so completely that the sheer arrogance of the name shows that not one of the men called wise really was. And yet, before the discovery of what is now called philosophy, there are said to have been seven men who, because they dared to inquire into questions of nature and argue about them, earned the standing and the name of wise men.

What a wretched, disastrous age, in which through the whole world only seven were called by the name of men — for no one can rightly be called a man unless he is wise! But if everyone else besides those seven was a fool, then not even they were wise, since no one can truly be wise in the judgment of fools. They were so far from wisdom that even afterwards, when learning grew and many great minds were fixed constantly on this one question, the truth still could not be seen and settled. For after the fame of those seven wise men, it is hard to believe how fiercely all Greece burned with the desire to search out the truth. First of all they judged that the very name of wisdom was arrogant, and stopped calling themselves wise men and called themselves lovers of wisdom instead. By doing that they convicted the men who had rashly seized the name of wise men of error and folly — and convicted themselves, too, of ignorance, which in fact they did not deny. For whenever the nature of a question laid its hands on their minds, so to speak, so that they could give no account of it, they used to declare that they knew nothing and could make out nothing. So they turn out to be much wiser, these men who saw themselves to some degree, than the men who had believed they were wise.

So if the men who were called wise were not wise, and neither were those of later times, who did not hesitate to admit that they lacked wisdom, what is left except that wisdom must be looked for somewhere else, since it has not been found where it was looked for? And what can we suppose the reason was that it was not found, though so many minds sought it with the greatest earnestness and effort, and over so many ages — unless it is that the philosophers were searching outside their own borders? Since they crossed and explored every region and nowhere found any wisdom, and since it must be somewhere, plainly it ought to be looked for above all in the place where the label of folly hangs. Under that covering God hides the treasury of wisdom and truth, so that the secret of his divine work should not lie open to view. That is why I keep wondering at this. Pythagoras, and Plato after him, were on fire with the love of searching out the truth, and they traveled as far as the Egyptians and the Magi and the Persians in order to learn their rites and institutions — for they suspected that wisdom had something to do with religion. Yet the Jews were the one people they did not go to, although wisdom was in their hands alone at that time, and they could have reached them more easily. But I think God’s providence turned them away, so that they would not learn the truth, because the religion of the true God and his righteousness were not yet permitted to become known to people of other nations. For God had decided, as the last age drew near, to send a great leader from heaven, who would reveal to foreign nations what had been taken away from a faithless and ungrateful people. I will try to take that subject up in this book — once I have first shown that wisdom is so closely bound to religion that neither can be separated from the other. [h]

The worship of the gods, as I taught in the previous book, does not amount to wisdom. Not only because it hands a human being — a divine creature — over to earthly and fragile things, but because there is nothing settled in it that could help shape a character or order a life. It contains no inquiry into truth; only the ritual of worship, which is not a service of the mind but an employment of the body. And so it is not to be judged true religion, because it teaches and improves no one by any rules of righteousness and virtue. In the same way philosophy, since it does not possess true religion — that is, the highest piety — is not true wisdom. For if the divine power that governs this world supports the human race with unbelievable generosity and cherishes it with a father’s indulgence, then it genuinely wants gratitude paid and honor given to itself; and a person cannot keep his piety if he proves ungrateful for the gifts of heaven, which is certainly not the part of a wise man. So, as I said, philosophy and the religious system of the gods stand apart, far removed from each other. Some men are professors of wisdom, and through them it is clear that there is no approach to the gods; others are priests of that religion, and through them wisdom is not learned. Plainly, then, the one is not true wisdom and the other is not true religion. Philosophy was not able to grasp the truth, and the religious system of the gods was not able to give an account of itself, since it is without the truth. But where wisdom is joined to religion by a bond that cannot be broken, both must be true. For in worshipping we ought to be wise — that is, to know what to worship and how — and in being wise we ought to worship — that is, to complete what we know by deed and action. [l]

Where, then, is wisdom joined to religion? There, of course, where the one God is worshipped; where life and every action is referred back to one source and one supreme authority; where, in short, the teachers of wisdom are the same men who are the priests of God. And no one should be troubled by the fact that it has often happened, and can happen, that some philosopher takes up a priesthood of the gods. When that happens, philosophy still is not joined to religion. Philosophy is simply off duty during the sacred rites, and religion is off duty when philosophy is being discussed. That whole system of rites is mute — not only because it has to do with gods who are mute, but because it is carried out by the hand and the fingers, not by the heart and the tongue, as ours is, which is the true one.

So religion is contained in wisdom, and wisdom in religion. Neither can be separated from the other, because wisdom is nothing but the worship of the true God with just and devoted adoration. And that the worship of many gods does not fit nature can be worked out even from this argument: every god a man worships has to be called on as father in the solemn rites and prayers — not only for honor’s sake but for reason’s, since he is both older than the man and supplies him with life and safety and food, as a father does. So Jupiter is called father by the people praying to him, and so is Saturn, and Janus, and Liber, and the rest of them down the list. Lucilius laughs at this in his council of the gods:

But if nature does not allow one man to have many fathers, since he is produced from one only, then the worship of many gods runs against nature and against piety.

One only, then, is to be worshipped, the one who can truly be called Father. And he must necessarily be Lord as well, because just as he has the power to be indulgent, he has the power to hold back. He is to be called Father because he grants us many great things, and Lord because he has the fullest power to correct and to punish. That the one who is a father is also a lord is shown even by the civil law. For who will be able to raise sons unless he has a lord’s power over them? And there is a reason he is called the father of a household, even when he has only sons: the word “father” plainly takes in slaves as well, because “household” follows it, and the word “household” takes in sons as well, because “father” comes before it. From this it is clear that one and the same man is both the father of his slaves and the lord of his sons. In the end, a son is set free from his father as though he were a slave, and a freed slave takes his patron’s name as though he were a son. And if a man is called the father of a household so that it may be clear he holds a double power — since as a father he ought to be indulgent, and as a lord to hold back — it follows that the one who is a son is also a slave, and the one who is a father is also a lord. So just as by the necessity of nature there cannot be more than one father, there can be only one lord. What will a slave do if many lords give him orders that contradict each other? So the worship of many gods runs against reason and against nature, since there cannot be many fathers or many lords, and the gods have to be reckoned both fathers and lords.

So the truth cannot be held where the same man is under many fathers and lords, and the mind, pulled toward many objects in many directions, wanders back and forth, here and there. Nor can religion have any firmness when it has no fixed and settled home. There can be no true worship of many gods, any more than you can call it a marriage when one woman has many husbands: she will be called either a prostitute or an adulteress. For when a woman has no modesty, no chastity and no faithfulness, she must be without virtue. In the same way the religious system of the gods is unchaste and unholy, because it has no faithfulness; that unsettled and uncertain honor has no source and no beginning.

From all this it is clear how closely wisdom and religion are connected. Wisdom has to do with sons, and that relation calls for love; religion has to do with slaves, and that relation calls for fear. For just as sons are bound to love and honor their father, slaves are bound to respect and revere their lord. But with God, who is one only, since he carries both roles at once, Father and Lord, we are bound both to love him, because we are sons, and to fear him, because we are slaves. So religion cannot be divided from wisdom, and wisdom cannot be separated from religion, because it is the same God who is to be understood, which is the part of wisdom, and to be honored, which is the part of religion. But wisdom comes first and religion follows, for the knowledge of God comes first and worship is the result of knowing him. So in the two names there is one meaning, though it looks different in each case. The one has to do with understanding, the other with action. Still, they are like two streams flowing from one spring. And the spring of wisdom and religion is God. If those two streams turn away from him, they must dry up; for people who do not know him cannot be wise or religious. [q]

And so it comes about that philosophers, and people who worship many gods, are like either disinherited sons or runaway slaves: the one group does not look for their father, the other does not look for their lord. And just as the disinherited do not come into their father’s inheritance, and runaways do not get off unpunished, so the philosophers will not receive immortality — the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom, that is, the highest good, the very thing they are especially looking for; and the worshippers of gods will not escape the penalty of everlasting death, which is the true Lord’s punishment for those who desert his majesty and his name. But that God is Father and Lord too was unknown to both, to the worshippers of the gods and to the professors of wisdom alike. Either they thought that nothing at all was to be worshipped, or they approved of false religions; or else, even where they understood the strength and power of the supreme God — as Plato did, who says that there is one God, the maker of the world, and Marcus Tullius, who admits that man was produced by the supreme God in an excellent condition — even so, they did not pay him the worship owed to him as supreme Father, which was their proper and necessary duty. But that the gods cannot be fathers or lords is declared not only by how many of them there are, as I showed above, but by reason as well. There is no report that man was made by gods, and the gods themselves are not found to have come before the origin of man, since it appears that there were men on earth before the birth of Vulcan and Liber and Apollo and Jupiter himself. And the making of man is not usually assigned to Saturn either, or to his father Caelus.

But if none of the gods who are worshipped is said to have originally formed and created man, it follows that none of them can be called the father of man, and so none of them can be God. Therefore it is not right to worship those by whom man was not produced, and he could not have been produced by many. Therefore the one and only God ought to be worshipped, who existed before Jupiter and Saturn and Caelus himself and the earth. He must have fashioned man, since before man was made he had finished the heaven and the earth. He alone is to be called Father, because he created us; he alone is to be reckoned Lord, because he rules, and holds the true and unending power of life and death. And whoever does not adore him is a foolish slave, one who runs from his Lord or does not know him, and an undutiful son, who either hates his true Father or does not know him.